History at the Limit of World-History

By Ranajit Guha

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory."

On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231505093

Book preview

History at the Limit of World-History

ITALIAN ACADEMY LECTURES

Italian Academy Lectures

Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English

Literature in a World Perspective

Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity

Ranajit Guha

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS     NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50509-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guha, Ranajit

History at the limit of world-history / Ranajit Guha.

    p. cm. (Italian Academy lectures)

ISBN 0-231-12418-X (alk. paper)

  1. World history. 2. Historiography. 3. History—

Historiography. 4. History—Philosophy. I. Title.

II. Series.

D20 .G756 2002

907′.2—dc21

2001047762

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

To the memory of Ramram Basu

who introduced modern historiography in

Bangla, his native language, by a work published

two hundred years ago

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities.

—T. S. Eliot, Gerontion

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Historicality and the Prose of the World

3. The Prose of History, or The Invention of World-History

4. Experience, Wonder, and the Pathos of Historicality 48

5. Epilogue: The Poverty of Historiography—a Poet’s Reproach

Appendix: Historicality in Literature by Rabindranath Tagore

Notes

Glossary

Index

This book has grown out of a series of lectures delivered at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University in October–November 2000. The argument presented in those lectures has been amplified somewhat in an epilogue written for this publication. Translations from the Bangla original for the article in the appendix, as well as for all other passages included in the text, are mine.

Sanskrit words have been distinguished by diacritical marks throughout the text wherever required by grammar and convention. Words of Sanskrit origin written without any diacritical marking should be regarded as vernacularized.

I wish to thank David Freedberg, director of the Italian Academy, and his staff for their solicitude and generosity in providing me with excellent conditions for work at the academy during the term of my fellowship.

My thanks are due also to Andreas Huyssen, director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and his colleagues Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hamid Dabashi for the initiative they took to organize a two-day workshop around these lectures on behalf of the center.

I am particularly grateful to a number of friends who took time off in the middle of their busy academic schedules to read drafts of the manuscript in part or in full. They include Homi Bhabha, Akeel Bilgrami, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Nimai Chatterji, Nicholas Dirks, Amitav Ghosh, and Edward Said.

I owe a very special debt to Sankha Ghosh, the distinguished poet and critic. His advice has been of invaluable help to me in interpreting and translating Tagore for this work.

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Herbert Matis, director of the Institut für Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte, Wirtschaftsuniversitӓt Wien.

Jennifer Crewe, Anne McCoy, and Rita Bernhard of Columbia University Press have all, in their respective roles, helped in this publication. I should like to acknowledge here my very sincere appreciation of their kindness and many-sided cooperation in seeing this book through the press.

As always, working on this project has been an experience in companionship with Mechthild Guha who has been with me through all the agony and excitement it entailed from beginning to end.

Purkersdorf, Austria

The argument in this little book made up of three lectures and an epilogue continues in a direction taken some twenty years ago, but does so at a depth not sounded in my work until now. The critique of elitism in South Asian historiography was central to my concern at the time. In developing that critique I tried to show how the peculiarity, indeed the originality of Britain’s paramountcy in the subcontinent as a dominance without hegemony, required the appropriation of the Indian past and its use for the construction of a colonial state. There was nothing in the structure or career of the Raj that was not fully involved in this statist enterprise. All of governance ranging from tax collection and land legislation through the establishment of a judicial system and a colonial army to the propagation of a colonialist culture by Western-style education and the promotion of English as the official language—every aspect of England’s Work in India relied for its success on the reduction of Indian history to what James Mill was sagacious enough to claim as a highly interesting portion of the British history. Which is why, I argued, it was up to the Indians themselves to try and recover their past by means of an Indian historiography of India.

All this, discussed at length in 1988–89 in an essay in Subaltern Studies VI and in my Deuskar Lectures, may perhaps be familiar by now to at least some of my readers from Dominance Without Hegemony (1997). However, I have come to realize that the plea for historiography’s self-determination would be heeded more and understood better if the questions raised by it were addressed as they occurred progressively in the course of academic practice. For occur they must because of the intrinsically radical character of a project that calls on the colonized to recover their past appropriated by conquest and colonization. A call to expropriate the expropriators, it is radical precisely in the sense of going to the root of the matter and asking what may be involved in a historiography that is clearly an act of expropriation.

What is involved is not only the fact or force of conquest but its collusion with all aspects of colonialist knowledge. Everything that answered that description, whether as philology or political economy, travelogue or ethnography, or any other in a long list of arts and sciences, was party to such complicity, but none more so than philosophy overarching and comprehending them all. Philosophy owes this primacy to its power of abstraction, which enables it to assemble and arrange all the manifold activities and ideologies associated with colonialism under the rubric of Reason. One of the most influential exercises in such abstraction, and certainly one that is of direct relevance to what concerns us in these pages, is available to us in Hegel’s writings on history. The phrase which succinctly sums up much of what he has to say on the subject, is die Weltgeschichte, rendered in English as World-history throughout this book with the hyphenation intended to emphasize its status as a concept rather than a description.

Hegel had inherited this term no doubt from the Enlightenment. But he elaborated on it and endowed it with a substantially new content until World-history came to be synonymous with Reason in History. This is a view of history that allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena which constitute the world and its historicality. How such abstraction is brought about by the logic of Aufhebung, that is, the act of superseding whereby denial and preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together, has been demonstrated by Marx in some of his commentaries on Hegelian texts. He shows, for instance, that, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right,

civil law superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals the state, the state superseded equals world history.

The outcome of this serial Aufhebung is to displace these entities from their actual existence and transform each of them into a philosophical concept so that, says Marx,

my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of law; my true natural existence, my existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art.¹

By the same token, historicality as the true historical existence of man in the world is converted by the act of superseding into philosophy of history and the concreteness of the human past made to yield to the concept of World-history. Which is why that concept and the uses to which it has been put in Hegel’s philosophy of history will engage us in the argument developed in these pages.

Aufhebung amounts to the transcending of a conceptual entity, as Marx points out in his reading of a parallel series from the Encyclopaedia where each term transcends the one that has gone before. "Thus, private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality," and so forth, until the last term, absolute knowledge, emerges hierarchically as the highest in which all the others are dissolved and affirmed at the same time.² In much the same way, the order of supersession in the aforementioned series taken from the Philosophy of Right culminates in the transcendence of World-history by the concept of God or Geist, as it is made clear not only in that text but in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History as well.

Transcendence entails, in this last instance, a claim to superior morality in favor of World-history. The latter, constructed transcendentally into a providential design, can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God, according to Hegel himself.³ And what we call God is, to put it in his own words, goodness, not just as a general idea but also as an effective force. Thus World-history, the plan of providence, acquires an aura of moral sanctity by definition, while the state, a key link in the chain of supersessions and the agency that promotes such a plan as the concrete manifestation of the ethical whole, comes to constitute ethical life itself.⁴

It is in this way that World-history managed to reach the high moral ground climbing on the back of philosophy. The latter, for its part, has proved itself truly to be a child of the Age of Imperialism. Going by Plutarch’s story about that meeting between Diogenes and Alexander in Corinth, there was a time when philosophers were eager to keep their distance from world conquerors.⁵ Not so in the post-Columbian era when it would be possible for one of its most distinguished thinkers to write

world history moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs…. The deeds of the great men who are the individuals of world history… appear justified not only in their inner significance… but also in a secular sense. But from this latter point of view, no representations should be made against world-historical deeds and those who perform them by moral circles to which such individuals do not belong.⁶

Our critique, which stands at the limit of World-history, has no compunction whatsoever in ignoring this advice. From the point of view of those left out of World-history this advice amounts to condoning precisely such world-historical deeds—the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment—as helped the great men who [were] the individuals of world history to build empires and trap their subject populations in what the pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe as Prehistory.

The critique is happy, therefore, to join issue with World-history, deny it the moral license for which Hegel pleads in the extract cited above, and pay no heed to his warning about the much discussed and misunderstood dichotomy between morality and politics.⁷ On the contrary, it is our intention here precisely to confront the philosophically certified higher morality of World-history with its politics by asking some difficult questions about the morality of colonizers claiming to be the authorized historians of lands and peoples they have themselves put under a colonial yoke. We do so not only to set the political record of colonial rule straight in such general terms as have any bearing on our discussion. What concerns us more is the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism.

It is the inadequacy of historiography that has

Reviews for History at the Limit of World-History

[ulfhjorr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Guha takes on Hegel's vision of world history and fails miserably. While Hegel's world history has many problems inherent in the philosophy, Guha doesn't adress these. Rather, he tries to take Hegel on head-to-head and comes up lacking because he misinterprets Hegel's writings.